I haven’t been motivated to write here for a while, but a friend pushed me and I’m grateful for that. I have been busy, really busy with life. But I wanted to talk about community.
What does it mean to you? By definition it is a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests. It’s important when you’ve had a loss to find some sort of community. It can be difficult after pregnancy and infant loss to find your community, particularly due to the stigma around this type of loss. I will be honest, I didn’t really feel like I had community early in my loss. I had people that certainly took care of me, but I still felt really alone. A lot of my sense of community initially came from the online loss world. Many people aren’t comfortable talking about grief, so when you do find a group of women that understand what you’ve gone through and have had similar experiences themselves, it’s unlike any relationship you’ve had, and it’s very rare. This past weekend, I brought four women together to openly honor their losses, begin healing and commemorate their sweet babies. With help from a local yogi, we started our day with a beautiful, peaceful and gentle practice to begin releasing our grief. We did this with the earth under our feet, beautiful large trees above us, with the sun peaking through and birds blessing us with their songs. It was so beautiful. The feeling I got after was immeasurable. It finally feels like I’ve done something really good with my losses. Something needed in our community. And something that I hope left the women feeling less alone and more connected than when they arrived. I saw a sign on my drive home today that said, you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. I hope the women left feeling like they could learn to surf the waves of grief.
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DeannaFinding love after loss and learning to enjoy the simple things.
July 2018
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